trends

Search trends tend to indicate what people are interested in; we all know about the swine flu spikes from a few weeks ago, for example.  Unfortunately for General Motors, search trends now show that consumers may be even more averse to buying its vehicles than to catching the bug.

 When it comes to hacking social networks, girls are showing that they are more practical than boys in terms of what they are doing. Girls are more likely to go after information that leads to bank accounts, while boys are more likely to hack social networks in a survey conducted in England by Trend Micro. 

 

It used to be one was at most risk of getting a computer virus via spam or frequenting bad Internet neighborhoods (places one probably shouldn’t be hanging out in the first place, picking up just any old download they come across). These days malware pushers have come out in the open where the masses collect, and places like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are starting to resemble the Time Square of old—with peril and vice all around.

Even if news programs offer almost nothing other than economic information these days, it seems that a lot of people are still seeking out more of the stuff on their own.  Fresh search data from the UK reveals that people are studying some rather depressing terms.

One of the reasons Google gets so much press coverage is, frankly, that its representatives are so good about discussing corporate developments.  And now things have been taken an informative/slightly ridiculous step further with a blog post summing up Google's blogging habits this year.

As you are no doubt aware, online video has experienced a tremendous year in 2008 in terms of growth and usage. I have personally documented a fair amount of the happenings in the industry over the year myself.

Google Reader has added some new data to the Trends department. For those who do not use Google Reader, or pay little attention to the Trends feature, it simply lays your reading habits out graphically so you can see when you are reading feeds the most, what you are reading the most, what you are reading the least, and so on.